In democratic countries, governmental officials are chosen by the citizens in an election. Conducting an election and voting for candidates for public office in the United States can be performed in several different ways. One such way utilizes mechanical voting machines at predetermined polling places. When potential voters enter the predetermined polling place, voting personnel verify that each voter is properly registered in that voting district and that they have not already voted in that election. Thus, for a voter to cast his vote, he must go to the polling place at which he is registered, based on the voter's residence. Another method for conducting an election and voting utilizes paper ballots that are mailed to the voter. The voter marks the ballot and returns the ballot through the mail. Mailed ballots have been historically reserved for absentee voting. In the usual absentee voting process, the voter marks the ballot to cast his/her vote and then inserts the ballot in a return envelope which is typically pre-addressed to the voter registrar office in the corresponding county, town or locality in which the voter is registered. The voter typically appends his/her signature on the back of the envelope adjacent to his/her human or machine readable identification.
When the return envelope is received at the registrar's office, the voter signature on the envelope is compared with the voter signature retrieved from the registration file database. This is typically performed by the voter's signature being imaged from the envelope and stored. The imaged signature is then compared on a monitor to the stored signature from the database to make a determination as to whether or not the identification information and signature are authentic and valid. If it is determined that the signature is authentic and valid, the vote included in the envelope will be counted. The identifying information and signature can then be separated from the sealed ballot before it is given to ballot counters for tabulation. In this manner, the privacy of the voter's selections is maintained and thus the ballot remains a “secret ballot.”
A problem with such validation processing is that it requires significant resources to perform, including imaging equipment sufficient to read the signature, image databases to store and protect the imaged signatures, and sufficient numbers of monitors to be able to make comparisons of large numbers of signatures in reasonable amounts of time. The increase in the amount of hardware and software necessary to perform this process can significantly increase the costs for validating absentee ballots. Additionally, voting by mail is becoming more prevalent, apart from the usual absentee voting, and in some jurisdictions, entire elections are being conducted exclusively by mail. Thus, there exists a need for efficient methods and systems for validating signatures on ballots sent through the mail.